Private Cloud for Collaboration and e-Learning Services: From IaaS to SaaS

The idea behind Cloud Computing is to deliver Infrastructure-, Platform and Software-as-a-Service (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS) over the Internet on an easy payper-use business model. The Hochschule Furtwangen University (HFU) is running their own private cloud infrastructure, called Cloud Infrastructure and Application CloudIA. The targeted users of the CloudIA project are HFU staff and students running e-Learning applications, and external people for collaboration purposes. Therefore, in this paper, the authors introduce their work in building a private cloud. More specifically, this paper shows how their cloud offerings in each of the cloud service models, i.e. IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, address the requirements and needs of e-Learning and collaboration in an university environment.